It’s tough to read any business articles or attend a conference today without hearing the term “Best Practices”. 
Sounds great, right? I want my organization to be using the best possible processes and practices available. If I do, I should be “optimized” and happy! Of course, there are a few “gotchas” along the way…like How do you define a best practice? Who decides what a best practice is vs. a good or better practice? What metrics do you use to benchmark yourself against the standard if you have one?
Let’s start with a definition. There are many out there, but the one I like follows.
Best practices are proven, repeatable, documented techniques that deliver measurable performance improvements. Executives look to best practices to help them speed their progress toward performance optimization, and to guide them around pitfalls that might otherwise slow or even halt their initiatives. Best practices:
- Align with strategy
- Reduce costs
- Improve productivity
- Enable better decision making
- Leverage/exploit technology
- Ensure control, compliance & risk management
- Promote collaboration within and beyond the enterprise
Now that we have a baseline, we’ll begin to explore “Best Practices” in more detail in later posts. Stay tuned, this will get interesting.
